Systems and methods exist for constructing representations of the real world in three-dimensional (3D) coordinate space. For example, some devices and techniques that have been introduced to enable depth perception in a 3D space include 3D cameras, stereoscopic cameras, time-of-flight cameras, light-field cameras, photogrammetry, coded aperture, etc. Applications of these devices and techniques include constructing 3D scans (e.g., scanning a person's face to mimic their facial expressions), measuring the distance from the camera to an object, determining the volume of an object by scanning the object, etc. Another important application includes tracking the movement of objects to and from locations in a real-world 3D space. For example, cameras are used for monitoring the movement of vehicles entering and exiting a parking lot. In one example, customers may park in a parking lot space while their grocery order is being filled, and the 3D camera may be trained to detect when a car has parked in a specific parking lot space. 3D cameras may also be used to track the movements of people to and from a given location (e.g., entering a building).
With rising customer demand for applications such as “grab-and-go” grocery experiences, service providers often need to make large capital expenditures and incur significant operating expenses overhead to maintain a set of monitoring cameras for a given location (e.g., a parking lot with several spaces). These capital expenditures may include purchasing a large number of cameras (e.g., one monitoring camera per parking space), and/or purchasing sophisticated 3D cameras (similar to the devices and techniques described above), whereby each 3D camera may cover a wider range and/or depth in a 3D space than a cheaper off-the-shelf camera may cover. Also, cameras with more sophisticated hardware may require more resources (e.g., human technical resources) to set up and be more expensive to maintain when the camera may require servicing. Therefore, there is a need to improve the process of using a camera to identify objects with known physical characteristics at a specific location within a real-world physical topography.